ABSTRACT
Michael Krings, Thomas N. Taylor†, and Carla J. Harper
3.1 INTRODUCTION
Ecosystems today represent complex biological units that are highly integrated and governed by multiple levels of biological interactions. Many of these interactions involve fungi that regulate ecosystem functioning in different ways (Dighton 2003). While this interdependency in ecosystems today is widely acknowledged, such biological interactions in the geologic past have only recently begun to be more intensively examined, mostly based on molecular data obtained from modern organisms (e.g., Martin et al. 2003; Floudas et al. 2012; Agić et al. 2015; Chang et al. 2015). The fossil record has only been used in a relatively limited sense (Taylor et al. 2015).
